by Lee Child
Eventually she asked, “How many are in there?”
Reacher said, “About sixty.”
“Oh my God.”
“Two or three a year, probably,” Reacher said. “They got a taste for it. An addiction. There are no ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist. What the stoner kid heard from time to time was real.”
“Who were they all?”
“Asian girls, I think.”
“You can tell that from their bones?”
“The last one isn’t bones yet.”
“Where were they all from?”
“From immigrant families, probably. Illegals, almost certainly, smuggled in for the sex trade. That’s what the Duncans were doing. That’s how they were making their money.”
“Were they all young?”
“About eight years old.”
“Are they buried?”
Reacher said, “No.”
“They’re just dumped in there?”
“Not dumped,” Reacher said. “They’re displayed. It’s like a shrine.”
There was a long, long pause.
Dorothy Coe said, “I should look.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“There are photographs. Like a record. Like mementos. In silver frames.”
“I should look.”
“You’ll regret it. All your life. You’ll wish you hadn’t.”
“You looked.”
“And I regret it. I wish I hadn’t.”
Dorothy Coe went quiet again. She breathed in, and breathed out, and watched the horizon. Then she asked, “What should we do now?”
Reacher said, “I’m going to head over to the Duncan houses. They’re all in there, sitting around, thinking everything is going just fine. It’s time they found out it isn’t.”
Dorothy Coe said, “I want to come with you.”
Reacher said, “Not a good idea.”
“I need to.”
“Could be dangerous.”
“I hope it is. Some things are worth dying for.”
The doctor’s wife said, “We’re coming too. Both of us. Let’s go, right now.”
Chapter 57
Dorothy Coe got behind the wheel of her truck again and the doctor and his wife slid in beside her. Reacher rode in the load bed with the captured rifle, holding tight over the tractor ruts, a long slow mile, back to where he had left the white Tahoe he had taken from the football player who had broken his nose. It was still there, parked and untouched. Reacher got in and drove it and the other three followed behind. They went south on the two-lane and then coasted and stopped half a mile shy of the Duncan compound. The view from there was good. Reacher unscrewed the Leica scope from the rifle and used it like a miniature telescope. All three houses were clearly visible. There were five parked vehicles. Three old pick-up trucks, plus Seth Duncan’s black Cadillac, and Eleanor Duncan’s red Mazda. All of them were standing in a neat line on the dirt to the left of the southernmost house, which was Jacob’s. All of them were cold and inert and dewed over, like they had been parked for a long time, which meant the Duncans were holed up and isolated, which was pretty much the way Reacher wanted it.
He climbed out of the Tahoe and walked back to meet the others. He took the sawed-off from his pocket and handed it to Dorothy Coe. He said, “You all head back and get car keys from the football players. Then bring me two more vehicles. Choose the ones with the most gas in the tank. Get back here as fast as you can.”
Dorothy Coe backed up a yard and turned across the width of the road and took off north. Reacher got back in the Tahoe and waited.
Three isolated houses. Wintertime. Flat land all around. Nowhere to hide. A classic tactical problem. Standard infantry doctrine would be to sit back and call in an artillery strike, or a bombing run. The guerrilla approach would be to split up and attack with rocket-propelled grenades from four sides simultaneously, with the main assault from the north, where there were fewest facing windows. But Reacher had no forces to divide, and no grenades or artillery or air support. He was on his own, with a middle-aged alcoholic man and two middle-aged women, one of whom was in shock. Together they were equipped with a bolt-action rifle with two rounds in it, and a Glock nine-millimeter pistol with sixteen rounds, and a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun with three rounds, and a switchblade, and an adjustable wrench, and two screwdrivers, and a book of matches. Not exactly overwhelming force.
But time was on their side. They had all day. And the terrain was on their side. They had forty thousand unobstructed acres. And the Duncans’ fence was on their side. The fence, built a quarter of a century before, as an alibi, still strong and sturdy. The law of unintended consequences. The fence was about to come right back and bite the Duncans in the ass.
Reacher put the Leica to his eye again. Nothing was happening in the compound. It was still and quiet. Nothing was moving, except smoke coming from the chimneys on the first house and the last. The smoke was curling south. A breeze, not a wind, but the air was definitely in motion.
Reacher waited.
Fifteen minutes later Reacher checked the Tahoe’s mirror and saw a little convoy heading straight for him. First in line was Dorothy Coe’s truck, and then came the gold Yukon Reacher had taken from the kid called John. It had the doctor at the wheel. Last in line was the doctor’s wife, driving the black pick-up the first Cornhusker of the morning had arrived in. They all slowed and parked nose to tail behind the Tahoe. They all looked left, away from the Duncan compound, studiously averting their eyes. Old habits.
Reacher climbed out of the Tahoe and the other three gathered around and he told them what they had to do. He told Dorothy Coe to keep the sawed-off, and he gave the Leica scope to the doctor’s wife, and he took her scarf and her cell phone in exchange. As soon as they understood their roles, he waved them away. They climbed into Dorothy Coe’s truck and headed south. Reacher was left alone on the shoulder of the two-lane, with the white Tahoe, and the gold Yukon, and the black pick-up, with the keys for all of them in his pocket. He counted to ten, and then he got to work.
The black pick-up truck was the longest of the three vehicles, by about a foot, so Reacher decided to use it second. The white Tahoe had the most gas in it, so Reacher decided to use it first. Which left John’s gold Yukon to use third, which Reacher was happy about, because he knew it drove OK.
He walked back and forth along the line and started all three vehicles and left them running. Then he started leapfrogging them forward, moving them closer to the mouth of the Duncan driveway, a hundred yards at a time, getting them in the right order, hoping to delay detection for as long as possible. Without the scope, his view of the compound was much less detailed, but it still looked quiet. He got the black pick-up within fifty yards, and he left the gold Yukon waiting right behind it, and then he jogged back and got in the white Tahoe and drove it all the way forward. He turned it into the mouth of the driveway and lined it up straight and eased it to a stop.
He slid out of the seat and crouched down and clamped the jaws of his adjustable wrench across the width of the gas pedal. He corrected the angle so that the stem of the wrench stuck up above the horizontal, and then he turned the knurled knob tight. He ducked back and hustled around the tailgate and opened the fuel filler door and took off the gas cap. He poked the end of the borrowed scarf down the filler neck with the longer screwdriver, and then he lit the free end of the scarf with his matches. Then he hustled back to the driver’s door and leaned in and put the truck in gear. The engine’s idle speed rolled it forward. He kept pace and put his finger on the button and powered the driver’s seat forward. The cushion moved, slowly, an inch at a time, through its whole range, past the point where a person of average height would want it, on toward where a short person would want it, and then the front of the cushion touched the end of the wrench, and the engine note changed and the truck sped up a little. Reacher kept pace and kept his finger where it was and the seat kept on moving, and the truck kept on acce
lerating, and Reacher started running alongside, and then the seat arrived at the limit of its travel and Reacher stepped away and let the truck go on without him. It was rolling at maybe ten miles an hour, maybe less, not very fast at all, but enough to overcome the wash of gravel under its tires. The ruts in the driveway were holding it reasonably straight. The scarf in the filler neck was burning pretty well.
Reacher turned and jogged back to the road, to the black pick-up, and he got in and drove it forward beyond the mouth of the driveway, and then he backed it up and in and parallel parked it across the width of the space, between the fences, sawing it back and forth until he had it at a perfect ninety degrees, with just a couple of feet of open space at either end. The white Tahoe was rolling steadily, already halfway to its target, jerking left and right in the ruts, trailing a bright plume of flame. Reacher pulled the black pick-up’s keys and jogged back to the road. He leaned on the blind side of the gold Yukon’s hood and watched.
The white Tahoe was well ablaze. It rolled on through its final twenty yards, dumbly, unflinchingly, and it hit the front of the center house and stopped dead. Two tons, some momentum, but no kind of a major crash. The wood on the house split and splintered, and the front wall bowed inward a little, and glass fell out of a ground floor window, and that was all.
But that was enough.
The flames at the rear of the truck swayed forward and came back and settled in to burn. They roiled the air around them and licked out horizontally under the sills and climbed up the doors. They spilled out of the rear wheel wells and fat coils of black smoke came off the tires. The smoke boiled upward and caught the breeze and drifted away south and west.
Reacher leaned into the Yukon and took the rifle off the seat.
The flames crept onward toward the front of the Tahoe, slow but urgent, busy, seeking release, curling out and up. The rear tires started to burn and the front tires started to smoke. Then the fuel line must have ruptured because suddenly there was a wide fan of flame, a new color, a fierce lateral spray that beat against the front of the house and rose up all around the Tahoe’s hood, surging left and right, licking the house, lighting it, bubbling the paint in a fast black semicircle. Then finally flames started chasing the bubbling paint, small at first, then larger, like a map of an army swarming through broken defenses, fanning out, seeking new ground. Air sucked in and out of the broken window and the flames started licking at its frame.
Reacher dialed his borrowed cell.
He said, “The center house is alight.”
Dorothy Coe answered, from her position half a mile west, out in the fields.
She said, “That’s Jonas’s house. We can see the smoke.”
“Anyone moving?”
“Not yet.” Then she said, “Wait. Jonas is coming out his back door. Turning left. He’s going to head around to the front.”
“Positive ID?”
“A hundred percent. We’re using the telescope.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Stay on the line.”
He laid the open cell phone on the Yukon’s hood and picked up the rifle. It had a rear iron sight just ahead of the scope mount, and a front iron sight at the muzzle. Reacher raised it to his eye and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the sheet metal and aimed at the gap between the center house and the southernmost house. Distance, maybe a hundred and forty yards.
He waited.
He saw a stocky figure enter the gap from the rear. A man, short and wide, maybe sixty years old or more. Round red face, thinning gray hair. Reacher’s first live sighting of a Duncan elder. The guy hustled stiffly between the blank ends of the two homes and came out in the light and stopped dead. He stared at the burning Tahoe and started toward it and stopped again and then turned and faced front and stared at the pick-up truck parked across the far end of the driveway.
Reacher laid the front sight on the guy’s center mass and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 58
The .338 hit high, a foot above Jonas Duncan’s center mass, halfway between his lower lip and the point of his chin. The bullet drove through the roots of his front incisors, through the soft tissue of his mouth and his throat, through his third vertebra, through his spinal cord, through the fat on the back of his neck, and onward into the corner of Jacob Duncan’s house. Jonas went down vertically, claimed by gravity, his stiff fireplug body suddenly loose and malleable, and he ended up sprawled in a grotesque tangle of limbs, face-up, eyes open, the last of his brain’s oxygenated blood leaking from his wound, and then he died.
Reacher shot the rifle’s bolt and the spent shell case clanged against the Yukon’s hood and rolled down its contour and fell to the ground. Reacher picked up the cell phone and said, “Jonas is down.”
Dorothy Coe said, “We heard the shot.”
“Any activity?”
“Not yet.”
Reacher kept the phone against his ear. Jonas’s house was burning nicely. The whole front wall was on fire, and there were flames inside, throwing orange light and shadows all around, curling flat and angry against the ceilings, gleaming wetly behind intact panes of glass, spilling out through the broken windows and leaping up and merging into the general conflagration. Smoke was still blowing south, and heat too, toward the southernmost building.
Dorothy Coe’s voice came back: “Jasper is out. He has a weapon. A long gun. He sees us. He’s looking right at us.”
Reacher asked, “How far back are you?”
“About six hundred yards.”
“Stand your ground. If he fires, he’ll miss.”
“We think it’s a shotgun.”
“Even better. The round won’t even reach you.”
“He’s running. He’s past Jonas’s house. He’s heading for Jacob’s.”
Reacher saw him, flitting right to left across the narrow gap between Jonas’s house and Jacob’s, a short wide man very similar to his brother. On the phone Dorothy Coe said, “He’s gone inside. We see him in Jacob’s kitchen. Through the window. Jacob and Seth are in there too.”
Reacher waited. The fire in Jonas’s house was burning out of control. In front of it the white Tahoe was a blackened wreck inside a ball of flame. Glass was punching out of the house’s windows ahead of flames that followed horizontally like arms and fists before boiling upward. The roof was alight. Then there was a loud sound and the air inside the house seemed to shudder and cough and a hot blue shimmer gasped out through the ground floor, like an expelled breath, clearly visible, like a force, and it rose slowly upward, one second, two, three, and then the flames came back even stronger behind it.
Dorothy Coe said, “Something just blew up in Jonas’s kitchen. The propane tank, maybe. The back wall is burning hard.”
Reacher waited.
Then the ground floor itself burned through and there was another cough and shudder as the flaming timbers tumbled through to the basement. The left-hand gable tilted inward and the right-hand gable fell outward, across the gap to Jasper’s house. Sparks showered all around and thermals caught them and sent them shooting a hundred feet in the air. Jonas’s right-hand wall collapsed into the gap and piled high against Jasper’s left-hand wall, and gales of new air hit fresh unburned surfaces and vivid new flames leapt up.
Reacher said, “This is going very well.”
Then Jonas’s second floor fell in with an explosion of sparks and his left-hand wall came unmoored and folded slowly and neatly in half, the top part falling inward into the fire and the bottom part angling outward and propping itself against Jacob’s house. Burning timbers and bright red embers spilled and settled and sucked oxygen toward them and huge new flames started licking upward and outward and sideways. Even the weeds in the gravel were on fire.
Reacher said, “I think we’re three for three. I think we got them all.”
Dorothy Coe said, “Jasper is out again. He’s heading for his truck.”
Reacher watched over the front sight of his rifle. He saw Jasper run for the lin
e of cars. Saw him slide into a white pick-up. Saw him start it up and back it out. It stopped and turned and aimed straight for the driveway. It blew through a shower of sparks, right past Jonas’s body, and it headed straight toward the two-lane. Straight toward Reacher. Straight toward the parked black truck. It braked hard and stopped short just behind it, and Jasper scrambled out. He opened the black truck’s passenger door and ducked inside.
Then a second later he ducked out again.
No key.
The key was in Reacher’s pocket.
Reacher put the phone on the Yukon’s hood.
Jasper Duncan stood still, momentarily unsure. Distance, maybe forty yards. Which was really no distance at all.
Reacher shot him through the head and he went straight down the same way his brother had before him, leaving a small pink cloud in the air above him, made of pulverized blood and bone, which drifted an inch and then disappeared in the breeze.
Reacher picked up the phone and said, “Jasper is down.”
Then he dropped the empty gun on the road behind him and climbed inside the Yukon. Lack of replacement ammunition meant that phase one was over, and that phase two was about to begin.
Chapter 59
Reacher drove the Yukon a hundred yards beyond the mouth of the driveway, and then he turned right, onto the open dirt. Lumps and stones squirmed and pattered under his tires. He drove a wide circle until he was level with the compound itself and then he stopped, facing the houses, the engine idling, his foot on the brake. From his new angle he saw that Jacob’s south wall was so far untouched by the fire, but judging by the backdrop of smoke and flame the north end of the house was burning. Ahead and far to the left he could see Dorothy Coe’s truck, waiting six hundred yards west in the fields, similarly nose-in and pent-up and expectant, like a gundog panting and crouching.